Le Fantome de la Liberte (1974)

October 14, 1974

BrilliantB un u el Film Closes 12th Festival:The Cast

By VINCENT CANBY

Published: October 14, 1974

After 17 days of good, bad, and mostly indifferent films, the 12th annual New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center closed triumphantly last night with the American premiere of Luis Buñuel's brilliant, anarchic new comedy, "Le Fantôme de la Liberté" (The Specter of Freedom"), which will begin its commercial run at the Paris Theater here on Oct. 27.

The premiere of "Fantôme" came the day after the festival's homage to Mr. Buñuel in the form of the retrospective showing of four of his earlier works, "L'Age D'Or" (1930), made in collaboration with Salvador Dali, "The Exterminating Angel" (1962), "The Milky Way" (1969) and "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" (1972). This had the effect of italicizing what we have all been saying for years: the Buñuel talent has continued to grow and refine itself at that period in a film maker's life when he is ordinarily expected to taper off, if not retire to campus or swimming pool.

Mr. Buñuel must be awfully tired of people going on and on about his age. (He'll be 75 nex February.) Yet the subject is pertinent when so few film makers have endured long enough to give us the benefit of the wit and wisdom that come only from living through decades of changing fashions. Writers, painters, musicians and composers survive into creative old age. Film makers have a way of wearing out too soon, like American automobiles. Not Luis Buñuel.

In "Le Fantôme de la Liberté" Mr. Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carrière, who has collaborated with the director on all of his feature films since "Diary of a Chambermaid" (1964), contemplate man's survival in spite of his idiocies. I'm not at all sure the film has as much to do with specific ideas about freedom as the title would imply. Rather, I suspect, the concept of freedom as touched upon in the film is just another in the system of reversals—one of dozens of dumbfounding paradoxes — that so fascinate and amuse this most free yet most disciplined of film makers.

"Le Fantñme de le Liberté" is not for people who see movies as butterflies, trophies to be netted, pinned down, then pulled apart with tweezers. The movie can't be pinned down. There's no single correct way to read it, which is not a rationale for its ambiguities, but a rigorous instruction to those who would enjoy all that is most marvelous and poetic in surrealism at its best.

The film opens in Toledo in 1808 as Napoleon's soldiers attempt to liberate Spain and summarily shoot all citizens who refuse to be liberated. "Down with liberty!" is the heroic cry of one of the victims standing before a Goya-like firing squad.

Thereupon the camera follows a French officer who, being slightly drunk on communion wine and stuffed with communion wafers, becomes enchanted by the beauty of the statue of a knight's wife on a sepulcher in the cathedral they're then violating. As the officer bends to kiss the statue, the stone hand of the knight's figure gives the officer a terrific swat, so enraging the officer he vows to take his pleasure with the dead lady, whose coffin, they find, is filled with paraphernalia.

"Paraphernalia?" asks a woman sitting in a park in modern-day Paris. "What is par-a-pher-na-lia?" The woman, a nanny, has been reading aloud to a friend the story we've been watching, at which point "Le Fantôme" moves into another story, that of the nanny, her small charge, a little girl who is given what seem to be obscene postcards by a strange man, and the girl's parents, who are so outraged by the postcards (pictures of Nôtre Dame, Sacré Coeur and the like) that they sack the nanny on the spot.

"Le Fantôme de la Liberté" is dozens of stories that lead from one to another with a dreamlike logic, and a dream-like way of never quite arriving at a neatly satisfactory conclusion. Among the characters who turn up are a courteous sniper, who shoots a couple of dozen people from the top of Montparnasse sky-scraper at the edge of Paris and becomes a celebrity; a group of poker-playing monks, a little girl who vanishes from school but is able to accompany her parents to the police station where she gives her own vital statistics, even though no one acknowledges her presence.

More than any other Buñnel film "Le Fantôme" recalls "L'Age D'Or" with its riddles, jokes, outrageous associations, contradictions and dim view of reason's power. "Le Fantôme" is no less dense with symbols (for those who care about such things), but the style is more precise, less heavy, much funnier, no less mysterious, yet so economical that when he ridicules the arbitrariness of a social convention, like table manners, he manages also to make a few pithy observations on ecology.

The physical production is stunning to look at. The cast is large, first-rate, but the presence that dazzles us is that of the Old Master, just off screen, mercilessly testing our senses of sanity and humor.